Description

It’s like fulfilling a promise to my younger self: to write this book. A book about myself. An ego-history, I suppose. Not a memoir. A story centred on the ego, but also on the world in which the ego lives, is influenced by, and fights against. A Sweden from the 1940s to the 1990s, a Sweden where women’s lives changed from a kind of imposed domesticity to ever-greater freedom and ever-greater—what, exactly? Both fear and ‘fuck-it-all-to-hell’ defiance.
I was born in 1943, right in the middle of the war, to a foreign mother who had fled Nazism and communism and a super-Swedish father whose watchwords were rationalism and perfectionism. I was rubbish at school. I had children before the contraceptive pill or free abortion existed. I stumbled reluctantly into the all-male academic world and, against all odds, became a professor.
Ah, the themes of my life take shape as I make my way through it: a longing for love (and sex), a longing to be recognised as a real person, a longing to write.
And it all turned out well. A sort of happy ending, for now.
Whilst I Was Young is Yvonne Hirdman’s autobiography. It is a lively and humorous account of a person who is often in the thick of the fray, does not shy away from conflict and is almost always at the centre of events. The story of an exciting life filled with the struggle for women’s rights.